Cathie Wood's ARK teams with Securitize to tokenize venture fund with OpenAI, Anthropic stakes

Cathie Wood's ARK Invest is putting its venture fund on blockchain rails, bringing a portfolio that includes stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks onto blockchain rails.

The ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX) will issue tokenized interests using infrastructure from Securitize (SECZ), with the tokenization firm handling onchain issuance and the investor experience.

ARKVX will be first available on Ethereum with other networks potentially following, the firms said.

“Making the ARK Venture Fund available onchain is a natural extension of our mission to democratize access to technologically enabled disruptive innovation,” Wood, ARK's founder, CEO and chief investment officer, said in a statement.

For Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo, one draw is giving investors diversified exposure to sought-after private technology companies.

“If you don't know whether OpenAI or Anthropic are gonna win the AI race, here you get both of them in a diversified pool,” Domingo told CoinDesk TV.